There are people here who probably have an actual answer -- but (without actually knowing) i would guess that it was because at that time soundtrack records were not overly common. Rock tracks were only just starting to be used, so it was almost a new genre -- ok, genre stretches it a bit, but it was something fairly new and different, they were maybe still ironing lumps out of it, figuring out what people want. That's just a guess though.

dysan wrote: A great mix, but would've liked more of the orchestral score included. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Somebody on ebay is selling the official Orchestral score by Howard Blake :

I believe it was Brian specifically who wanted to have the dialogue in and did much of the original mixing of the album, so that the story of the movie was present via those clips. If I remember correctly, he said it otherwise would've sounded like a bunch of musical clips with no context.

Personally, I'd love to hear the entire thing without dialogue as well.

And I have a copy of the Howard Blake score (which is, naturally, dialogue-free) and it's quite good.

As far as I know, the best answer to the question "why is there dialogue from the movie on the Flash Gordon soundtrack" is "because the band wanted it that way". And I love it as-is.

Having said that, I would dearly love a "clean" version of the soundtrack album i.e. just the music without the dialogue and sound effects. That would have made a perfect bonus disc for the Flash re-issue, although the Flash demos were nice too.

But as with so many things in life, you have to appreciate what is and not pine for what you wish things were.

I don't think the songs are strong enough to be played by themselves, and Brian was very much aware of that. Background music for a movie is meant to be in the background only, and it needs to be very different when it's listened to all by itself.

A good example of this is Flash's Theme which sounds like a dull and monotonous demo on the album, and only becomes interesting in the single remix where it has entire "verses" made out of the film dialogue.

I thnk snippets of dialogue from the film works very well on soundtrack albums. It puts the music directly in to context with the film. Flash Gordon was very good early example of this. The same can be said for many of the tracks from A Kind Of Magic album too. For me quite a few of the songs on magic would be worse without the dialogue from Highlander included.

The inclusion of dialogue seems to work forTarantino too, and he probably has some of the best selling soundtrack albums out there. Although in his case the dialogue tends to be slotted between the music tracks rather than in the songs themselves, because the music was not specifically composed for the film.

Composer's note: 'I was brought in in a crisis situation when it was found that the composer nominated by 'Queen' had for some reason been unable to complete 'more than one minute' of a score for the film. I was summoned to a meeting at CTS Wembley by sound recordist John Richards and Brendan Cahill head of music for Universal Studios Hollywood. The RPO had been booked for two weeks and started recording the day before but had nothing else to play. I said it would take at least 4 weeks to write the amount of music required, possibly 90 minutes. After ferocious negotiations with my agent Liz Keys at London Management I began work, but the time gradually whittled down to 10 days and the last 4 days of that I didn't sleep. An added complication was to include various guitar phrases and the song 'Flash' within my large-scale score for 80-piece orchestra. Somehow I finished it and conducted the 3 days of recording sessions, but afterwards I went back to my house in Mortlake and collapsed exhausted. My wife had left the house with the 2 children at the end of my first writing day, bothered by endless phone calls and courier bikes. She returned on the Saturday expecting me to have left for France on the Thursday. In fact I had been asleep for 3 days. She called a doctor who injected me with something to wake me up. He said it was possible I would never have woken up at all, since I was suffering from chronic bronchitis due to total exhaustion! Anyway I recovered and I and everybody else were pleased with the score. Dubbing sessions began and I later discovered that much of my score had been replaced with synthesized music, myself having demonstrated how to handle it. A disappointment. However, my relations with the members of Queen were always cordial. Brian May came over one day and hummed an idea for an 'overture'. As he did so I jotted it down on some manuscript paper and then played it back on the piano, which really startled him. They all came along to the orchestral recordings and seemed fascinated. I remember Freddie Mercury singing the idea of 'Ride to Arboria' in his high falsetto and I showed him how I could expand it into the orchestral section now on the film, with which he seemed very pleased. Whilst scoring I had cassettes of guitar ideas from Brian, in particular the slow 'falling-chord' sequence. I wrote this out into my score at one point and surrounded it with big orchestral colour. When I came to the recording I had Brian's solo guitar on headphones and conducted the orchestra in synch. around it. Many months later Brian came over and we listened to the finished album.'

It's worth mentioning too that it was only a couple of years after Jeff Wayne's War Of The World - perhaps Queen envisaged something along those lines. Of course, if the film had done better it might have ended up being one of their biggest albums. They learned to not put all their eggs in one basket next time a film OST presented itself to them.